NOOK Takes To The Web, Dangles Free Bestellers As Carrot

If you're a NOOK user, you just got another way read your NOOK ebooks. If you're not a NOOK user, Barnes & Noble has a new way to reel you in. This morning, B&N announced the NOOK for Web, which lets you browse and read books from any computer's Internet browser. To bring you into the store, B&N is making six bestsellers available free to anyone - you can read them without signing up for an account.

If NOOK for Web sounds a little like Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader, that's because it is. One area where NOOK has a leg up is that it supports Internet Explorer (as well as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), where as Kindle Cloud Reader doesn't yet support IE. Kindle also requires an account, where NOOK doesn't, but given that accounts are free for either service, the advantage of account-less reading won't matter much to some.

Support for browsers on smartphones and tablets is coming soon, but NOOK apps are already available for many popular devices. The real bonus to the browser support will likely be that you can shop for books easily from your mobile device.

Importantly, NOOK for Web syncs your books, meaning that you can read a few pages on your NOOK device, move to your computer, and pick up where you left off when you visit www.mynook.com.

You can check out the free bestsellers at www.nook.com/NOOKforWeb, but not forever. B&N ends the gravy train July 26th.